Query about printing books

I'm guessing most books published these days are printed digitally, rather than old fashioned litho. I'm reading Lord of the Rings again at the moment, and get a kick from the fact that because of the age of my copy, it was once hot metal.

They use web for big runs like Tesco fliers. I think Son is right. Digitally set maybe but digital print is for very small specialist runs. Its a while since I commissioned any printed stuff so I'm out of touch but I think they still use a plate of sorts.

I should mention though that I think its moved on and they don't actually print books anymore. They flow directly through the ether to appear on a magic slate now don't they?

Web (paper comes of a big roll) printers are usually cost effective when the run goes over 15,000.

Hot metal faded out in the early 90's and was a true art form. I've worked with a couple of newspaper printers in Northern Ireland who still have their old hot metal type setting room intact.

Random fact: manual hot metal typography is what gave UPPER CASE and LOWER CASE their respective names. Capital letters were stored in the top case as they weren't used as often as the standard letters.

Someone might be able to fill in the detail or correct me, but somewhere I have a line of letters all in one moulded strip that I seem to remember my Dad giving me after a visit to a print works in the 70's. I think they had a computer system where you entered the text and it made the hot metal strips in some kind of automated moulding system. Could this be right?

Scroat - you must be older than you look. I just did a bit of research (OK I admit it - I looked it up on WickedPaedophile) to find out more about that wonderful word "FLONG". And I discovered that flongs have not been used since the late 19th century! FLONG

Uberdog - that was an excellent explanation, but doesn't quite go far enouh to answer Scroat's question, which now has me intrigued. How does the image of type and pictures etc get transferred from its digital form onto the metal plate that is used to transfer the ink to the paper?

I think the answer these days is that the digitised information is lasered directly on to the litho printing plate in a process called (oddly enough) "Computer to plate". Up to a few years ago it used to involve chemicals and acids.

Quaz - you didn't imagine it. I have seen these too. I think this process was an intermediate stage called electrotyping

Well that's all incredibly boring interesting isn't it?.

No doubt the boffins are already working on the next post-Kindle stage of data transfer i.e. do away with the printed and spoken word altogether and just beam information straight into our brains.

And yes I am older than I look. Used to work on the then hot metal, Linotype Reading Chronicle in the 70's. Then a stint on the Monotype Henley Standard. Linotype had each line as a piece of metal, and Monotype had each letter individually cast. Once the page was finished and locked, the Chronicle used glorified papier maché flongs to take an impression of the page. This in turn - being flexible - was used to cast the curved plates that went on the rotary press.

The Henley Standard was printed on a flatbed printer in those days, so was printed directly from the flat frame of type.

Just to be even more boring, the linotype machine's keyboard had a different layout to QWERTY, and gave rise to the word ETAOIN - these being the most commonly used letters.

Modern technology is so soulless, which is why I get such a buzz from old books.

My only experience of newspapers was years ago when I produced a tabloid lookalike for a chain of offies. It was called "News of the Booze" and was full of spoof booze-related stories. I got the Chester Chronicle to print it on one of their down days.
When I went to visit a bastard great truck with massive rolls of paper arrived. "That's your newsprint from Russia, I was told. I shat myself! I had to double check the maths. True enough a million copies takes a few trees out and also made the NotB one of the top tabloids for a day.

There is a badge of honour to be seen in many advertising / design agencies offices around Belfast.
If you were working during the hot metal days and designed an advert for a newspaper, after the print run you would usually be given the actual physical, metal advert back to keep for your records - which now can be seen acting as quite unique paper weights.

My late uncle Roy Victory used to do the pictures for the FT in the days when they didn't really have any pictures. I remember him proudly showing us a metal plate of one of these very rare pictures. He was a union man in those Fleet St. days. Later in life he moved up to middle management, his house in Romford became valuable and inevitably his politics drifted east.

As a child I used to have a rotating wheel with all the letters of the alphabet (handy, that) that you could feed a small, ticker tape sized piece of plastic behind and stamp out your own messages that became sticky labels for things. I never tried to complete a whole print run of Lord of the Rings, though.

Oddly enough, Wikipedia is still type set using hot metal litho then scanned directly from plate using OCR technology with a correcting mirror. The process is known as lithosuction and was patented by George Atkinson of Askrigg.

I know this is an old post but I think you all need some clarification on this topic. All books are nowadays printed using the offset (litho) method. Any other method would be far too expensive. Lithographic printers are printing in higher resolution as digital printers. If you were to print just a small run, it works out cheaper to do it digitally, but otherwise you have to go to some magazine printing or book printing company like printcarrier or print24.